Bort was released recently. Peter Cooper speculated that "...it could well catch on as the de facto bare bones / generic Rails application". But, what about us non-RSpec users? There are dozens of us, I tell you. Dozens!

We build a lot of apps at GiraffeSoft — we love to experiment with whatever ideas excite us on any given day. We're all sick of editing restful_auth code, and moving tests over to Shoulda and the one assertion per test pattern. Bort doesn't suit our needs. So, blank was born.

Right now, it's pretty simple. It has authentication, and forgot password. That's about it. But, it's no biggie. Since blank creates your new app as a git repo that shares history with blank's repo, you can pull in changes we make at any time. So, when we finally get around to implementing openid support, you'll get it for free, if you start with blank.

Vendored

All of our standard tools (and rails) are vendored:

active_presenter

andand

attribute_fu

hoptoad

mocha

rake

restful_authentication

ruby-openid

will_paginate

Installation

Installing blank is as easy as running a rake task. Except that blank uses thor instead, because it’s the new hotness, and it supports remote tasks.

That’s it! The thorfile will display a couple of rake notes where you should replace blank app with your app's name. Also, you'll want to fill in your hoptoad API key in config/initializers/hoptoad.rb.

If we improve the thor file, all you have to do is run:

$ thor update blank

before creating your next app, and you’ll get the changes automagically.